Absolutely incredible. I never thought I'd see a working Alto like this, and even connected to ethernet playing a multiplayer game with a modern computer. Amazing achievement!
At 13:35 - The IBM 1620 was the first computer I ever used in tech school. It was obsolete even then, but still it was a computer. This was 1972, and I had never even seen a computer before. Somebody had written a program that played music through a transistor radio placed on it. It used whatever radio-like "noise" that the computer generated to do it. Pretty amazing.
I had a look at the docs for the Mesa language (which was used for programming the Alto). The language itself is quite sophisticated and has things like monitors and signals. But then there is the “binder”, which is a whole other language for describing how to combine modules together in intricate ways. And all this ran on a 16-bit machine with a 64-kibiword address space...
It's nice you had enough time to get around and enjoy the show. I always end up glued to our display! Congrats on 2nd place! There was a lot of good competition at the event!
Nice. @16:08 I saw a SWTPC 6800 machine was available in the consignment area. Depending on price I would have picked that up. The logo on that Informer machine at 17:21 looked familiar.
*I bought one of these second (or third hand or more) in 1991, and used it all the way through the early 2000s! They were GREAT!. And indestructable too!*
I used to work at one of the Xerox New Enterprise companies (a software company) about 20 years ago, and we had an Alto that was used for defect reports and tracking. I was quite surprised when I first learned that such a vintage computer was still in use at what was essentially a software startup company, but there it was, and yeah, clearly much was lifted from it, rather directly, by Apple for the Lisa and of course the Mac. It was terribly cool to actually get to use a piece of history as part of my work in the modern era. I was (and still am) a software developer, so I didn't use the Alto as often as the testers did, but I think I appreciated it more. They were like "Oh, that old thing!" I was more like "Wow, I get to use one of these!" :) On a side note, around that time period I saw a local news video that gave a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the bell tower at the city park (specifically San Diego's Balboa Park), and I saw something else that surprised me, as well: everything there was run by a Commodore 64! :)
The HP Integral PC: Basically a potable HP 9000, it was HP's first attempt at a portable UNIX workstation. Quite a rare machine, possibly due to its price, but at the time it was quite possibly the most powerful portable computer on the market.
My dad had a Tektronix workstation back in the 80s - but the only things I really remember about it were the huge external floppy drives and playing a top-down line-based driving game. You entered the angle and distance and with any luck you didn't exit the track. It was no Assetto Corsa but for 8-year-old me it was fun for a few minutes until my dad kicked me off so he could work.
I've only attended VCF Midwest, but golly the folks out west sure bring out some weird and wonderful machines. I gotta make it to one of these other VCF shows sometime!
I'd like to see someone recreate the MIT 6.112 version of Maze War which was written for a dedicated computer made entirely of TTL logic. What is really remarkable about the Smalltalk implementation on the Alto is that it is done entirely in microcode so that the processor is actually handling the Smalltalk instructions as if they were native. And, like the later Lisp machines, the code for the underlying environment can be edited in real time.
good evening timewaster video. I went to VCF East XII this past April and had a blast and a half. hard mode, need to get an Alto on this side of the US and route traffic through a VPN on both sides and do a live demo of maze wars being played across the continent over the internet. I wonder what the latency would do to the game...
Just saw an article that COBOL programmers are back in demand since some facets of the financial infrastructure still operate on dinosaur tech! So hey, there's that. Looks like lots of nerdy fun at the museum. Good job guys.
This was fun and I wish I had made it to WCF. Also interesting because the PARC panel included Jim Rowson who I grew up with, and Bob Rosenbloom who I went to college with! Would have liked to have seen them both in person!
22:58 A TI-59 calculator and PC-100C printer! I had a TI-58C which, sadly, died many years ago. But I wrote the ti5x emulator for Android as a reincarnation, if you like.
I believe so, I hope to get my 3B1 to VCF East sometime! The 3B1 has a different architecture though its a PC whereas the 3B1 is more of a mini computer.
That's very strange, 'cause we in the UK are told by the propaganda machine that an English person with a double-barrelled name who worked at CERN invented the internet. Looks like this Xerox system trumped that, in main part, by 20 years. Was Alto available for sale or was it only for internal use in the Xerox Company ?
Major historical and technological mix up here. CERN indeed made the first web page, but that was way after the internet was in relatively widespread use. The internet was the outgrowth of Arpanet, a planet wide data network joining together local networks. Xerox invented wired Ethernet, a packet oriented data network, itself inspired by the seminal Alohanet, a wireless radio packet network from University of Hawaii. Ethernet then became the main transport protocol on which the Internet is run, but Internet can and did run on many other data network transport infrastructures. These three completely different things: a browsing (software) protocol (web pages, from CERN), a worldwide data network (Internet from ARPAnet), and a physical network transport protocol (Ethernet from Xerox). It just happens that these three became the main underlying technologies on which the modern world wide web is running.
Absolutely incredible. I never thought I'd see a working Alto like this, and even connected to ethernet playing a multiplayer game with a modern computer. Amazing achievement!
At 13:35 - The IBM 1620 was the first computer I ever used in tech school. It was obsolete even then, but still it was a computer. This was 1972, and I had never even seen a computer before. Somebody had written a program that played music through a transistor radio placed on it. It used whatever radio-like "noise" that the computer generated to do it. Pretty amazing.
I had a look at the docs for the Mesa language (which was used for programming the Alto). The language itself is quite sophisticated and has things like monitors and signals. But then there is the “binder”, which is a whole other language for describing how to combine modules together in intricate ways.
And all this ran on a 16-bit machine with a 64-kibiword address space...
I think Mesa was for dev on the Star, not the Alto. Plenty Alto code in BCPL tho.
It's nice you had enough time to get around and enjoy the show. I always end up glued to our display! Congrats on 2nd place! There was a lot of good competition at the event!
It's because Ken and Carl did all the hard work at our exhibit, freed me up quite a bit as soon as the talks were over. Which exhibit was yours?
Nice. @16:08 I saw a SWTPC 6800 machine was available in the consignment area. Depending on price I would have picked that up. The logo on that Informer machine at 17:21 looked familiar.
thanks for capturing an overview with each of the exhibitors. great machines with interesting stories
Congrats on your award as it was well deserved.
7:24 That is not a “recreated” control panel, that is an original control panel from an actual mainframe that ran Multics.
Thanks for filming this Marc!!
The Tektronix screen is gorgeous!
I know, right? I would give a leg to have one of those!
No wonder people loved these. The crispness & motion of the graphics is fantastic.
*I bought one of these second (or third hand or more) in 1991, and used it all the way through the early 2000s! They were GREAT!. And indestructable too!*
I used to work at one of the Xerox New Enterprise companies (a software company) about 20 years ago, and we had an Alto that was used for defect reports and tracking. I was quite surprised when I first learned that such a vintage computer was still in use at what was essentially a software startup company, but there it was, and yeah, clearly much was lifted from it, rather directly, by Apple for the Lisa and of course the Mac. It was terribly cool to actually get to use a piece of history as part of my work in the modern era. I was (and still am) a software developer, so I didn't use the Alto as often as the testers did, but I think I appreciated it more. They were like "Oh, that old thing!" I was more like "Wow, I get to use one of these!" :)
On a side note, around that time period I saw a local news video that gave a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the bell tower at the city park (specifically San Diego's Balboa Park), and I saw something else that surprised me, as well: everything there was run by a Commodore 64! :)
(17:27) my old bank use to use those terminals at the desks for bank transactions!
The HP Integral PC: Basically a potable HP 9000, it was HP's first attempt at a portable UNIX workstation. Quite a rare machine, possibly due to its price, but at the time it was quite possibly the most powerful portable computer on the market.
My dad had a Tektronix workstation back in the 80s - but the only things I really remember about it were the huge external floppy drives and playing a top-down line-based driving game. You entered the angle and distance and with any luck you didn't exit the track. It was no Assetto Corsa but for 8-year-old me it was fun for a few minutes until my dad kicked me off so he could work.
Subscribed after I saw you featured on Gizmodo. Great video. Love your history with hardware.
I love those little details on the Lisa OS!
great work on your Alto exhibition
the Tektronix 4052A is awesome !!! I'm wondering if it has a ceramic CRT
I love those blinking lights!
I've only attended VCF Midwest, but golly the folks out west sure bring out some weird and wonderful machines. I gotta make it to one of these other VCF shows sometime!
I like how a NUC is powering a supercomputer. :)
Really neat video!
I'll have to put this one on the bucket list. Thanks for the great footage!
I'd like to see someone recreate the MIT 6.112 version of Maze War which was written for a dedicated computer made entirely of TTL logic.
What is really remarkable about the Smalltalk implementation on the Alto is that it is done entirely in microcode so that the processor is actually handling the Smalltalk instructions as if they were native. And, like the later Lisp machines, the code for the underlying environment can be edited in real time.
good evening timewaster video. I went to VCF East XII this past April and had a blast and a half.
hard mode, need to get an Alto on this side of the US and route traffic through a VPN on both sides and do a live demo of maze wars being played across the continent over the internet. I wonder what the latency would do to the game...
Just saw an article that COBOL programmers are back in demand since some facets of the financial infrastructure still operate on dinosaur tech! So hey, there's that. Looks like lots of nerdy fun at the museum. Good job guys.
Multics! I’d love to see some more on Multics as it is very hard to find good information on.
I was there I pulled a logic state analyzer from the free pile
2:18 - recreation of the very first 'screen watching' or 'screen peeking' in a multiplayer game. 😁😁
This was fun and I wish I had made it to WCF. Also interesting because the PARC panel included Jim Rowson who I grew up with, and Bob Rosenbloom who I went to college with! Would have liked to have seen them both in person!
I really enjoyed that. Thank you.
22:58 A TI-59 calculator and PC-100C printer! I had a TI-58C which, sadly, died many years ago. But I wrote the ti5x emulator for Android as a reincarnation, if you like.
The Tektronix reminds me of the fun I used to have with an HP A3 flat bed plotter.
Thanks computer festival welcoming 2022
Wonder if that drive above the Lisa is a Twiggy.
This is great may we help less fortunate
At 24:25 that is damn good graphics!!
Sehr spannend. Viele Grüße von einem Fan aus Deutschland.
(Very exciting. Greetings from a fan from Germany.)
Would that be nice if they would play background music according to the time of the machines.
Damn, I want a copy of Contralto & Iran Wars. I was cracking up, at the latter, in your last Alto video!
0:24 On the far right, is that a 3B2?
I believe so, I hope to get my 3B1 to VCF East sometime! The 3B1 has a different architecture though its a PC whereas the 3B1 is more of a mini computer.
"Federation festival" whered you pick that one up?
Marc, do you know Hakan Lans? Kind Regards🇸🇪
What is the computer with the large graphics display at 22:40?
It's an AT&T smart graphics terminal of some kind. Very green, ran an early windowing environment (pre X-windows).
and where is xerox windows 10 and why we have microsoft windows?
I think the Xerox Star OS would let you have duplicate file names as well as Lisa OS.
11:45 a New Way of Overclocking 😨😨😂😂
how did you connect ContrAlto with real alto?
id love to have the ability to just shut the machine off at the button like the apple lisa.
Or like windows 95 on a kuka KRC1 robot?
Cool historicaly
Thank you :) QC
Alternative Title: Long lost son reunites with father.
Man...americans have conventions about everything!
That's very strange, 'cause we in the UK are told by the propaganda machine that an English person with a double-barrelled name who worked at CERN invented the internet. Looks like this Xerox system trumped that, in main part, by 20 years. Was Alto available for sale or was it only for internal use in the Xerox Company ?
Major historical and technological mix up here. CERN indeed made the first web page, but that was way after the internet was in relatively widespread use. The internet was the outgrowth of Arpanet, a planet wide data network joining together local networks. Xerox invented wired Ethernet, a packet oriented data network, itself inspired by the seminal Alohanet, a wireless radio packet network from University of Hawaii. Ethernet then became the main transport protocol on which the Internet is run, but Internet can and did run on many other data network transport infrastructures. These three completely different things: a browsing (software) protocol (web pages, from CERN), a worldwide data network (Internet from ARPAnet), and a physical network transport protocol (Ethernet from Xerox). It just happens that these three became the main underlying technologies on which the modern world wide web is running.
"The people who don't need StackOverflow"
O M G ! Very Cool.
Awsome
Last time I saw Dick Lyon we were drinking scotch on the backyard deck of a mutual friend in Los Altos. Darn he got gray. (Me, gray? Prove it.)
Awful lot of emulators for a "vintage" festival haha
Great stuff though, wish we had something like this here!
Comeon the Alto should have got first place!
:-)
First
You are now vintage